A Joyous Perspective on Judgment: A habit worth watching carefully

 

Judgment is like junk food. Oh, does it taste good!

Think you can't eat just one potato chip? Try only having one judging thought. There is something so salty and crunchy about judgment thoughts. One could easily make a meal of them if it weren't for the annoying after-effects. 

Thinking someone is terrible, stupid, or mean is like eating popcorn. One thought leads to another and another until we are mindlessly gorging on a big bowl of negativity. Just as it is easy to watch a movie while thoughtlessly munching snacks, our minds can process our daily activities while endlessly thinking about who did what to whom and what a lousy person their actions make them. 

Theoretically, we could still protect ourselves and watch out for problematic people...

It requires that we restrict moral blame. We feel compelled to take it one step further, don't we? It is not enough that a person has hurt or angered us; we must file a mental indictment of their very character. Trust leaves. Faith is gone. All the evidence points to conviction, and we have all the evidence we need.

In a judging state, we relish any diagnostic or scatological term that will define someone's shortcomings. Trust me, the mental health field is loaded with terms to call people who do things we disapprove of, as is all of our culture. We can't ever get enough of negative categorizing, and we develop new ones each day. Are you a "Karen" or a "Kevin"? "Trumper" or "Snowflake"? You get my drift...

And yet not one of these terms affects or changes the issues we are concerned about.

If they did, humankind's problems with life would have been solved by now. For thousands of years, hatred and rage have been used to attempt to solve problems, with plenty of violence to enforce the judgments. But at some point, we are still left with the need to solve the problem. As I tell someone in my practice at least once a day, you have to leave the drama triangle and reject chaos to truly solve the problem:

Oh, but this triangle feels so gratifying and so comfortable. So delicious...

If judgment and the drama it attracts were not so gratifying, we could bypass it altogether and get on to the solution part. We could step back, analyze the issue, and find a resolution. But emotion often wins when it comes to a contest between emotion and reason. Chaos ensues, and the feeding frenzy is on. The social media posts and responses are piling up. The views of the video are replayed in your mind...

Solution finding is not nearly so much fun.

The reward centers in our brains must be addressed with long, nuanced lists of pros and cons. Problem-solving may be a better response to reality, but it won't light up your brain's emotional hotspots, nor will you get that yummy sugar-rush certainty of how much better you are than those troublesome people out there.

When you fantasize about penalizing those who offend you, it costs your health and happiness. Judgment may make you feel full of power, to be sure, but the ability to punish is a stress-filled engine. And with that stress tank comes the sense of constant threat. 

What if we decided to go to problem-solving the moment we are met with the option of judgment? 

What if we realized that the drama triangle was a threat zone, not a comfort zone?

You would feel lighter as if a burden had been lifted. You would feel like a gorilla had climbed off your back. You would start thinking about what you want to do, not what others have done. You would think about how to move on versus how to fight to the finish. You might start attempting to understand instead of defining without information. You could ask, "What if I give up the outcomes and focus on understanding?" It requires faith in the problem-solving process. Faith is hard. Judgment and doubt are so much easier.

When we stop eating junk food as a way to cope, we lose unwanted weight...

It is the same with going on a judgment diet and learning to solve the problem instead. If you are only sometimes focused on what to judge next, you will find other more exciting and rewarding options and opportunities. The weight you'll lose outside of the drama triangle is the weight of the world. Just as you can never eat enough junk food to make your problems disappear, you can never judge enough to improve the world. Besides, all you were ever responsible for was making the inside of you a better place.

Shifting away from junk-food judgments will have just that result.